Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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Tangled Bank 112

There was a bit of a mix up over the blog carnival Tangled Bank, which was supposed to appear last week, while its organizer was swanning around the Galapagos, presumably with other things on his mind. Well it is up now, with a couple of treats. One, alas, is broken. Tangled Banks says that “insects have been selecting hotter hot peppers for some time now. Andrew Bernardin at the Evolving Mind blog points out that “Mexican Food was Not Intelligently Designed.” Alas, Andrew’s blog at Evolving Mind seems to be a bit broken. And it is neat; the heat in chillies protects them from a fungus that destroys the seeds, but is ignored by birds, who disperse the seeds. My question: do birds detect chilli heat, but fail to be put off by it? Or are they completely oblivious to its presence? I mean, could you teach a bird to distinguish seed with chilli from seed without chilli?

The other treat is GrrlScientist, who takes that gray horse paper we blogged a while ago and really goes to town on it, complete with photos, graphs, and movie allusions.

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Fishy business

I missed this when it came out a couple of days ago, but a study by Daniel Pauly at the University of British Columbia shows how small-scale fishers 1 are short changed by “well-intentioned eco-labelling initiatives and ill-conceived fuel subsidies”. I’d expect no less from Pauly, who has always been a champion of artisanal fisheries. Industrial fishermen 2 receive 200 times higher fuel subsidies than artisanal fishers, who also discard far less fish as waste. Campaigns to persuade shoppers to buy eco-friendly fish have not paid off either, according to Pauly.

“For the amount of resources invested, we haven’t seen significant decrease in demand for species for which the global stocks are on the edge of collapse,” says Pauly. “Market-based initiatives, while well-intentioned, unduly discriminate against small scale fishers for their lack of resources to provide data for certification.”

Fish really does represent the ethical frontier of food. Farmed pollutes and wild destroys the stocks. What’s a piscivorous person to do? Get rid of the subsidies, say Pauly and his colleagues. Without subsidies, large-scale fisheries would not survive, small fishers would thrive supplying local markets, and global fish stocks would have an opportunity to rebound.

So we can overfish them again?

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Soil: don’t treat it like dirt

That headline, seen on a few big ol’ pickup trucks in the US, only really works in the US, where people do have a strange habit of referring to soil as dirt. But pop on over to National Geographic magazine this month for a full discussion of the state of US soil. It’s the basis of everything else that grows, and an amazing repository of agrobiodiversity, and all too often people do treat it as dirt.

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Slight mess

I spent the afternoon upgrading the engine that powers this site, and that might have been a mistake. Two things don’t work. Latest Posts over on the right now shows Nibbles, those little collections of links. It shouldn’t, and it didn’t used to. I can’t figure that out right now. And the Map for geo-referenced posts doesn’t work either. That could be trickier to fix. But I won’t even be able to try for a week or so because I’m off on the road again. I hope everything else is working …

On the other hand, if you’re reading this on an iPhone or iPod Touch, you’ll be astounded. I claim no credit. It is all down to the geniuses who built WPtouch.